Bonbons of science and skepticism

Mercury as imaged by the MESSENGER spacecraft during its fly-by yesterday. More information on this image I was following the fly-by on Twitter yesterday, but I missed some of the drama of the spacecraft going into safe mode until I got home from work. It turns out that some of the data was lost, but [...]

The Very Large Array in New Mexico. Photo March 1993. The astronomy undergrad group I was part of as a student stopped at the VLA as part of a spring break tour of the southwest we did in 1993. We got a nice tour of the control room, including going up the very same stairwell [...]

Space Shuttle Enterprise at National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. September 2006. The view from the other end than was in Picture of the Week #6.

Skeleton of Buettneria at the American Museum of Natural History in New York From the information plaque: One of the large temnospondyls that lived in the Triassic of North America was Buettneria. This animal, with its large toothed skull and small limbs, may have been a lurking aquatic predator, similar to modern crocodiles. Buettneria must [...]

M8 – The Lagoon Nebula, taken with the Prime Focus Camera on the 30-inch telescope at McDonald Observatory in 1998 (AASTRA participants took the images and then I combined them into the image you see here).